[aur-general] Deletion of orphaned packages on AUR4

[David Kaylor]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 11:16 PM, Lukas Fleischer <lfleischer at archlinux.org>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> There seems to be quite some confusion about the package migration
> process and about package deletion. I would like to clarify my point of
> view. Hopefully it serves as a basis for discussion (i.e. technical
> discussion without attacking anybody personally).
>
> As already mentioned a couple of times, cleaning up the AUR was one of
> the incentives for having users resubmit their packages. This has
> several advantages:
>
> * Working packages: New users are confused when an AUR package does not
>   build. However, packages are often broken because of being outdated or
>   unmaintained.
>
> * Less clutter: Working packages are easier to find. Package statistics
>   are not distorted.
>
> * Storage: Less space used for packages that do not work. On the AUR
>   server and on mirrors.
>
> So please do not upload packages any packages to AUR 4.0.0, unless you
> are interested in maintaining them. If a package has not been
> resubmitted to the AUR 4.0.0, the maintainer did not care about it for
> at least two months. Please either decide to maintain such a package or
> wait for somebody else willing to do so.
>
> Along these lines, it might also make sense to generally delete packages
> that have been unmaintained for a long time. Maybe have a script to
> automatically remove packages that have been orphaned for a couple of
> months. Note that we do keep the Git repositories of deleted packages,
> so if anybody wants to maintain the package later, he can always clone
> the repository of the deleted package, fix the package and simply push
> it afterwards. We are also working on a command to revive deleted
> packages without having to add a new commit. Package deletion is
> equivalent to "hiding it from the website", it does not mean that the
> package and all its Git history are gone. Orphaning a package is a
> preliminary stage that only tags a package without hiding it.
>
> The "missing dependency" argument was brought up a couple of times. If
> you discover such a case, please contact the maintainer of the package
> that requires the missing package and ask him to submit it as well. You
> should only maintain an AUR package if you are using it, so everybody
> should be interested in maintaining dependencies of their packages as
> well (unless they are maintained by somebody else already, of course).
>
> Regards,
> Lukas
>


Thanks for clarifying your point of view Lukas. I think some AUR
maintainers are out-of-the-loop on the migration issues, for one reason or
another. I suspect some simply weren't subscribed to this list over the
last few months.